Community Engagement
Building community through shared authority and advocacy
In addition to documenting the histories of our Arab American community, another goal of Mawtini is to initiate a meaningful process of community-building to more proactively advocate for ourselves as Arab Americans in San Luis Obispo.
Many narrators expressed difficulties in feeling a sense of community in SLO. Several mentioned that the genocide in Gaza that began in 2023 brought the Arab community closer together than ever before, but external pressures and lack of support or even recognition from city leaders, lawmakers, and the wider community continue to hinder our sense of collective belonging and inclusion here.
Oral history can be a powerful advocacy tool for marginalized communities. Rarely in oral history projects are the people who are interviewed asked to make their own interpretations of the information they have provided.
Michael Frisch, however, argues that oral history is a "shared authority," one in which historians, narrators, and the public should collaborate in the meaning-making process. Having the opportunity to listen to and comment on the interviews of other participants can engender a stronger sense of communal identity and historical understanding among narrators.
The community can then use that shared knowledge to better express the cultures and histories of their group to the dominant society, countering racist propaganda and stereotypes while expressing their collective needs to policymakers. Community-centered oral history, then, can be a political tool that harnesses the knowledge and skills of both the researchers and the narrators toward community advocacy.
Community Workshop
On September 9, 2025, we held a closed workshop during which the Mawtini researchers, administrators, interviewers, narrators, and additional Arab community members came together to discuss these issues. Narrators listened to and spoke about common themes they heard in each other's interviews and discussed how our community can better organize and advocate for ourselves in San Luis Obispo. This was the first step in a community-building process that has since continued and ventured beyond this oral history project.
Images from the September 2025 community workshop
This was the first step in a community-building process that has since continued and ventured beyond this oral history project.